Around the Blogosphere

We leave for Edinburgh this week, the first stop in our epic 32-day summer break in Scotland and Ireland. As we get closer to departure I’m starting to realize that I don’t know what I don’t know. For instance, I forgot to select our seats until recently (long story!) and now the flight is close…

The financial news outlet MarketWatch has been collecting ideas for a feature it calls the best new ideas in retirement. The goal is to explore the most innovative thinking on the subject, from how we save for it, to how we spend it, to what it all means. “Preparing mentally for retirement may be as…

It’s graduation season for university and college students across North America. The biggest story of the week came from tiny Morehouse College in Atlanta, where Morehouse’s commencement speaker and tech billionaire Robert Smith pledged to pay off the student loan debt of the entire Morehouse Class of 2019. Smith’s generous gift will wipe away student…

The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board manages $392 billion in assets on behalf of some 20 million Canadian contributors and beneficiaries. Operated at arms-length of the federal government, the CPPIB is the 11th largest sovereign wealth fund in the world (Norway’s trillion dollar pension fund leads the way). While questions about Canada Pension Plan solvency…

We’ve heard arguments that misconduct only happens with “a few bad apples”, while the rest of the industry is full of good guys and gals looking out for their clients’ best interests.

A client is moving her portfolio to the robo-advisor Wealthsimple, where she will save a minimum of $5,000 in annual fees. Her former advisor is not happy about this, as you’d expect, and sent an email filled with all the reasons why she’d be better off staying invested in his actively managed mutual funds. Most…

No, I didn’t get blocked by Suze Orman. But respected journalist and consumer advocate Ellen Roseman did when she had the audacity to call out Suze on Twitter, saying, “giving advice made Suze Orman rich and famous, which makes it harder for her to offer advice to normal people anymore.” Ellen tweeted in response to…

What’s your biggest money fear? The answer likely depends on your age and stage of life. Twenty-somethings might say they fear living in debt forever, or that they’ll never be able to afford a home. Those in their thirties might fear they’ll never stop living paycheque to paycheque. Forty-somethings might fear losing their job and…

It’s frustrating to feel like you’re not making any progress with your finances. Maybe you haven’t got a raise for a while, or you’ve been slogging away at debt payments for months at a time, or a stock market dip took your investments right back to where you started. Some people get desperate to make…

The reason I put so much emphasis on low investment fees is because it’s one of the few key areas that investors can control (the others being asset allocation, rebalancing, and savings rate). Yet most investors focus on the area they cannot control – their portfolio returns. While it’s reasonable to expect investment returns in…